This is off a tribute album to the late Jeff Porcaro. Jeff played drums on a lot of Steely Dan records and was considered by many to have the tightest groove in the business. I have heard ace black drummers talk about his pocket in the most reverential of terms. Jeff's father, longtime L.A. session player Joe Porcaro, is playing drums on this Milt Jackson tune. Sometime Steely Dan guitar player Denny Dias is on guitar on this track.

Porcaro is best known for being in the band Toto but played sessions with a murderer's row of talent. I print his wiki discography below.

Porcaro died young, there was a slight controversy if the cause was an allergic reaction to pesticides or a bad ticker, exacerbated by cocaine use. In any case, whatever the cause, the world lost an outstanding musician.

Leslie and I saw Clapton play the Sports Arena several years ago. She is college buds with Mitch, Clapton's videographer, and he graciously gifted us first row center seats and we got to go hang out on the tour bus. No crapping on the tour bus, they made it very clear.

It was an interesting show. J.J. Cale played a few songs, sitting on a chair. Other guitarists were Robert Cray, Doyle Bramhall II and Derek Trucks. All of the performers equipped themselves very well but at least to my ear, Cray rose above the group. Like George Benson, he seemed to vocalize every note. He is really a fine player.

When I am down I come back over and over to this groove. Albert Collins, a telecaster, a small old amp and his fingers, that's it, what an amazing tone! All hail the iceman…As you might notice, usually everything is played above the seventh fret. Loses a string near the end of this one but doesn't seem to miss a lick.

This was shot in Japan, there is a night time version of the Mt. Fuji gig on line where he plays with his regular bass player, also good, this player James Stevens was on loan from the Brecker Brothers. Trumpeter Steve Howard plays with the Meters and a bunch of New Orleans people. The mullet. I love guys like Albert Collins, T.Bone Walker, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray, guitarists that all sang as well as they played. We lost a great player when Albert passed.

Everybody has a favorite guitar player. There is no right answer. What's better, strawberry or grape jam? There is no right answer. McLaughlin is my personal favorite, his notes seem to touch the more remote crevices of my soul and he always plays with the best of accompanying musicians. An attack that is admittedly too fast for some ears, but always underscored by a tremendous musicality and an almost alien sense of time.

I could post Fred Neil songs all day, he never wrote or performed a bad one. An incredible musician and voice, he influenced so many people, Kantner, Stills, Nillson, Campbell notwithstanding. A musical superhero with just the right touch of melancholy.

I think that it is time to celebrate one of the current red headed stepchildren of music, the poor old major 7th. In the seventies you couldn't get away from the blasted thing, think America and Michael Martin Murphy, now its as passé as a loud fart at the church picnic.

My friend Eric plays keyboard with a lot of bands, Chemical Romance, Jason Mraz among others. He turned me on to the yacht rock concept a few years ago, seeking out seventies cheese for your listening pleasure. In fact he set the bar to what may be an unprecedented height with this song by the danish Tommy Seebach Band doing Apache.

My friend Dave Blackburn is a superb musician on so many levels. Started out on sax, then became an ace jazz drummer and guitar player. He and his wife Robin Adler lead a stellar group of musicians named Mutts of the Planet and he has been producing and recording music for decades. I hesitate to call him my guitar teacher because I haven't had a lesson in several years but at least he was once, and a very patient one at that.

This is a score he did for a film for another artist friend, Michael Maas, for a video commemorating Michael's most recent art opening. Hope that you enjoy it as much as I do.

The music starts after some dialogue at 1:22. A very simple & beautiful version of this song.

Crosby & Nash put on a free "No Nukes" concert at Churches Beach park in 1979, just north
of San Onofre Nuclear power plant in North San Diego County. After some serious re-engineering
mistakes and new construction defects of tubes that hold and cool fuel, the state of California forced
So Cal Edison to permanently shut down the reactors last year. IMHO, excellent governance, in righting a wrong that should never have happened in the first place.

Prior to Creedence, there was the Blue Velvets. The band started with John, Stu and Doug in 1959, fine rhythm player Tom joins the band in 1960. They joined Fantasy in 1963 and briefly had their name changed to The Visions. In 1964 the label renamed them the Golliwogs. In 1967 the name of the band was once again changed to Creedence Clearwater Revival.

I look at the history of Creedence as almost a tragedy. The animosity between the former band members, who John didn't even allow on stage at the Rock and Roll hall of fame induction, is legendary.

I hate it when front men get all the glory and think that they alone are responsible for the music. Go down the list of people who were seduced by the spotlight and ultimately diminished the sound, Paul Simon, Sting, John Fogerty, David Byrne all immediately come to mind. Never quite as good as the original group effort.

Sparrow was John Kay's first band in Toronto. This song was written by Dennis Edmonton aka Mars Bonfire, who was the brother of the drummer in both Steppenwolf and Sparrow, Jerry Edmonton. The name of the band was originally Jack London and the Sparrows when they were founded in 1964. German born John Kay did not join the band until 1965. Wiki says that they originally faked british accents. The original band had future Springfield member, the late Bruce Palmer on bass.

Steppenwolf were a truly pioneering band, saw them many times, I think that they coined the term heavy metal (as in heavy metal thunder). Goldy McJohn had one of the great white afros, rivaling the guy in Room 222.

I think that I can safely spill his secret identity. NYSTAN, who often comments on the Blue Heron Blast and occasionally here, once played bass with the Incredible String Band, known at the time as Stan Lee.

Stan is a sweetheart, still gigs occasionally in his native New York, a brilliant man, a wonderful photographer, an irascible curmudgeon at times, teaches photography and has worked with a ton of musicians through the years, people as diverse as Muddy Waters and Janice Ian. Lives with a small dog somewhere near Central Park. I never see him anymore except in cyberspace and it is a real drag.

Another singer/songwriter who is not well known enough. This was his first (and maybe only) hit/video from the late '90s. The only other song anybody seems to be House and 90 Acres which I also considered posting.

Here Rick is in Japan, It is getting near the end. Rick is seriously overweight and obviously very unhealthy. Yet for all of his travails he still manages to coax out the most beautiful and bittersweet notes on this plaintiff tune, my favorite of all of the great songs by the Band.

This concert was from April 8, 1997. He was arrested a month later in Japan with a small amount of heroin and ultimately given a suspended sentence. He died in his sleep, of heart failure, two years later, at home in Marbletown.

I loved Rick Danko, caught him solo when I could and still miss him and his music terribly.

This is a song by Fallbrook's favorite troubadour, the late Larry Robinson. Russ Kunkel on drums, Larry on rhythm, Steve Runolfsson with vocals, Lynn Rominger on lead guitar and Bryan Garofalo playing bass. This was their third single, released in 1968 and was produced by David Crosby.

Larry was senselessly murdered last year at the music store he worked in in Temecula. There is a large reward out now, people still trying hard to find his killer. You couldn't ever meet a nicer man than Larry Robinson. He passed away March 23, 2013. I believe that there is a memorial march this weekend for him in Temecula.

Thursday, March 20, 2014

Evie was the first to record Chip Taylor's Angel of the morning in 1967 but she experienced serious problems with her label immediately folding after she had cut the single. Most people are more familiar with Merrilee Rush's version but they are both equally good. Also done by P.P. Arnold, Skeeter Davis, Juice Newton and a million other people. Some people think that Chrissie Hynde has delivered the greatest version and it certainly ranks with the best. Evie's can be heard here.

If you're wondering how my sister got to be such a redneck, let me tell you a little about our childhood. We traveled all over the country, one crappy missile base to another, never quite shook the dust off. One of the stops was Las Cruces, about 1963, under the shade of the Billy the Kid bar in Mesilla, NM. Stuff sticks to you like hot winds, cotton fields and freight trains.

This was written by a clean and sober Steve Earle. I don't remember what year. This is one of my very favorite songs by anyone. Guy Clark also did an amazing cover of it. I haven't been listening to a lot of music this year (this blog is helping with that) but I could probably fill the blog up with just amazing stuff by Steve.

The Strangeloves were a fictional band created in 1964 by a New York-based American songwriting production team who pretended to be from Australia. Consisting of Bob Feldman, Jerry Goldstein, and Richard Gottehrer, The Strangeloves most successful singles were "I Want Candy," "Cara-Lin", and "Night Time". Before the invention of The Strangeloves, the three-member team ‒ often going by FGG Productions ‒ had already scored hits for other artists including 1963's "My Boyfriend's Back" by the American female group, The Angels.

According to the press releases, The Strangeloves were three brothers named Giles, Miles, and Niles Strange who were raised on an Australian sheep farm. The brothers' fictional backstory involved getting rich with the invention of a new form of sheep crossbreeding (the long-haired "Gottehrer" sheep allegedly registered with the Feldman-Goldstein Company of Australia) which allowed them the time and financial freedom to form a band. The story did not exactly capture the public's imagination, but The Strangeloves' singles still performed respectably well especially in the United States.

Although the Oxford Circle are remembered by hardcore psychedelic collectors as a San Francisco psychedelic band due to their shows on the city's ballroom circuit in 1966 and 1967, they actually formed in Davis, about an hour to the east. The group played energetic garage-psychedelia that was heavily derivative of British bands such as the Yardbirds and Them, and managed to release just one single, "Foolish Woman"/"Mind Destruction," for the tiny World United label. The flipside was a feedback-drenched piece of raw psychedelia, but it would not be appropriate to place the Oxford Circle in such rarefied air as unheralded Northern California psychedelic legends like the Great Society or even the Final Solution. The group's original material was unexceptional, owing more to punkish blues-rock than groundbreaking psychedelic sounds. Drummer Paul Whaley joined Blue Cheer, which sowed the seeds of the Oxford Circle's breakup, though oddly enough, future blues star Joe Louis Walker played with the group briefly. Gary Lee Yoder, the Oxford Circle's principal songwriter, formed Kak (which recorded for Epic) and also showed up in a late version of Blue Cheer. An entire 1966 concert, in surprisingly excellent fidelity, formed the basis for an Oxford Circle CD in 1997 that also included their single and a couple of unissued cuts.

Just to complete things. It is real hard to choose a Steve Earle song. This one has always been one of my favorites. In fact the entire Exit 0 album rocks hard. Then, once you have chosen a song you have to decide where in his career do you want to hear it from. BTW, this is an amazing album.

Aum was a bay area blues power trio that regularly played a lot of shows at the Fillmore and Avalon. Fronted by excellent guitarist Wayne Ceballos. There is an interesting excerpt in Greenfield's Bill Graham biography that recounts how Ceballos played with the Grateful Dead one night when Jerry Garcia was late to the show. And I guess that he played really well. I came across this excellent post this morning that reveals that he jammed with the Dead on at least four occasions.

Monday, March 17, 2014

Great Peruvian band from the late 60's early 70's. One of the best songs ever to capture the feeling of freedom of riding on a motorcycle. A metaphor for political freedom during a time of repression in S.A..

Longtime and original Stooges drummer Scott Asheton died the day before yesterday of cancer at the age of 64. One of the Chi-lites died last week. They are dropping off like flies ladies and gentlemen.

"A good example of the country ragtime style, as Elizabeth Cotten calls it, that might be played at cornshucking parties. Portions of this piece are known by other fold guitar pickers, and she herself rarely plays it twice through the same way. The term ragtime generally describes a guitar style with a steady rhythm on the 3 bass strings with a highly syncopated melody on the 3 treble strings. - Mike Seeger"

The Raiders version definitely can't hang with old Max Frost and the Troopers. If you ever get up to the Hendrix Museum in Seattle you will be amazed at how much play both the Kingsmen and Raiders get up in those parts. Science Fiction museum is attached to the same Gehry building, great must do experience if you are up that way.

The Misunderstood were a Riverside, CA sixties band that has definitely reached major cult status in recent years. This may be off a very late release from the band. They were fronted by an exceptional steel guitar player named Glenn Ross Campbell, who is said to have created the first light show.

The real father of rock and roll? How 'bout Wynonie Harris, 1948. Read this interesting essay. I speak with tongue firmly in cheek, movements like music don't really have fathers, nothing is borne entirely in a vacuum. What we do have is transitional periods where cultural trends seem to quickly accelerate.

The term Rock and roll came from an earlier antecedent, Rock music, which was derived from rhythm and blues, which was borne from blues, which was beget by gospel, which was based on early jubilee music which came from the life experience of slavery, which came from Africa. I have written on jubilee before, it was a non secular singing practice once outlawed in this country.

"After a regular worship service, congregations used to stay for a “ring shout”. It was a survival of primitive African dance. So, educated ministers and members placed a ban on it. The men and women arranged themselves in a ring. The music started, perhaps with a Spiritual, and the ring began to move, at first slowly, then with quickening pace. The same musical phrase was repeated over and over for hours. This produced an ecstatic state. Women screamed and fell. Men, exhausted, dropped out of the ring."

I reject the treatise that Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Alan Freed, Bill Haley or any other fine character was the father of this movement. Elvis was heavily influenced by Jake Hess, the fine tenor in Hovie Lister's Statesmen, a band themselves heavily influenced by the black jubilee groups. Hess was reportedly devastated when Elvis chose secular music over gospel. These people were all very important but there were definitely earlier "fathers."

Another "father" that we can certainly credit is Sam Cooke. Here is a clip of the band he started with, the Soul Stirrers. They were an early Texas "hard gospel" band, started by Roy Crain, fronted by Paul Foster and eventually Cooke. They were a major influence on many artists including Mahalia Jackson and the great Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

You see what a short jump it is from this music to Chuck and Little Richard. All the notes are already there. Sam Cooke's decision to sing non religious songs led the way to the "bird" bands, the black bands and doo woppers of the fifties whose music suddenly got more secular and less conspicuously religious. This following cut is religious but also damn good so I include it here.

Jazz, blues, rock, we owe all the greatest American musical idioms to Africa and the horrible practice of slavery. The exposure of the african rhythm to the scottish/irish music of their masters' forebears and gave birth to a musical hybridization and explosion that has rocked and rolled the world. Would shudder to think what we would be listening to today without the african contribution. Thanks Bill Haley, thanks Elvis, even you Pat Boone, you know who you owe big time.